My core values #edcamp #whyi..

working on my paper, here's what came out ..........

My educational manifesto is based on my three core values. Through two leadership groups I am a participant in ( Aspiring Principals Leadership Academy at Oakland Schools and Why I Leadership Cohort at Birmingham Schools), I have done an exercise repeated that is flipping through a stack of cards to pick your Core Values.  The results of this can be viewed in this presentation and are summarized below.

My first core value is learning. Learning takes several manifestation in my values. First my own life long learning and continuing to be challenged. Secondly to model, support, and create opportunities for others to learn including students and teachers to extend their learning.  Lastly our decisions must be based in what’s best for student learning because that is the bottom line. Supporting student learning is the foundation of our profession.

The next core value is innovation. Innovation has three aspects for me. First it speaks to my love of technology. But innovation is more than flashy technology, it is creativity in all forms. The purpose of innovation is to find ways for all learners to be successful. This is what drew me to special education. The three aspects of innovation are technology, creativity, and success for all learners.

Inspiration is another core value. I used to focus on passion. My passion is about me and in service of me following what’s important to me. If you take that same energy and turn it in service of others you have inspiration.  I find inspiration in my personal learning networks of twitter, edcamps, Aspiring Principal Leadership Academy, Why I cohort, and my mentor at work. I hope to be that inspiration in others.

Learning Innovation Inspiration

Technology vision #edtech

Technology Vision

Our world today is drenched in digital connections to the world. Internet tools and functions are required in order to keep up with the competition. Content knowledge is no longer a valuable skill because we have build machines that are better at content than humans can ever be.

The valued skills that people need in this world is analyzing and creativity. We need analyzing because our machines can give us thousands of pages content and information. It’s like the guilty criminal who  is suspended for records. They hand over thousands of pages of useless information but that one convicting piece is in there somewhere. Information is no good without the ability to evaluated how well it means your purpose.  With the access we have today, educators need to teach analyzing, sorting, and evaluating content and information.

Dr. Zhao’s video about world class learners and the creative class really hit home for me. I crave the change that innovation brings but most people are not like that. He talks about how our students will face problems and have jobs that are not invented yet. I would updated that statement to WE face those problems and have those jobs. I am a mentor online teacher. This is not a job that existed five years ago. As educational leaders we need to be aware that the teachers are facing the same changing realities that we expect them to prepare students to face. And odds are they are more scared then the students.

There’s a large group of educators that just love technology myself including. I believe in trying all the latest. But I do not believe in “tech for tech’s sake”. I support teachers playing on their own time to add to their overall knowledge base. But if we are bringing that tech into the schools, where it will take economic and teacher resources, we need a higher standard. When mandating technology, we need to make sure the adoption is grounded in student learning and not an excessive burden to budget and teachers. Technology cannot be just entertaining. It must engage the learner. More thought on this topics can be found on my blog on this post.

As an educational leader is it my duty to support teachers. My goal is to take those great skills and caring they already have and make it as easily as possible update their skills to address the changing needs to our students. Our decisions need to be based on student learning, not flashy trends. Educational leaders should always be the advocate of resources for staff to support the whatever adoptions are mandated.

Better my blog

I am trying to improve my blogging. Here's my to do list

Improve layout
get link to web site going
twitter link working
tag cloud

put images on all posts. I found this resources with free sources. http://weblogs.about.com/od/startingablog/tp/FreePhotoSites.htm
I like pixabay best so far.

 and just tested here< you can paste a picture into a blog post. You cannot do that on Google sites yet. You have to save then upload the picture which is a huge pain.

It's hard to find resources on Blogger so if you have any ones you like, please point me there.